“Forget Freytag’s Pyramid (of Predictable Male Prose)—behold Gore’s Upside Down Triangle (of Fierce Feminist Narrative)! We Were Witches is its own genre, in its own canon.”

—”Kate Schatz, author of Rad American Women A-Z

Ariel Gore’s We Were Witches is one woman’s body refusing to become property, refusing to be overwritten by law or traditions, one woman’s body cutting open a hole in culture so that actual bodies might emerge. A triumphant body story. A singularly spectacular siren song.

—Lidia Yuknavitch

Ariel Gore’s We Were Witches is both magical and punk rock—the way it takes traditional values and traditional story structure to task, the way Gore’s protagonist, Ariel, uses witchy intelligence to resist a system totally against her.

—Michelle Cruz Gonzales

We Were Witches seizes the shame and hurt internalized by young women and turns it into magic art and poetry. Ariel Gore’s writing is a diamond pentacle carved into a living heart, transforming singular experience into universal knowledge.”

—Susie Bright

An incisive and engaging work of literary genius that never loses heart. Gore speaks with the brazen and tender voice of a neglected, hidden generation about hidden and vulnerable truths.

—Lasara Firefox Allen

We Were Witches is raw and truthful, painfully funny, inspiring of outrage, and alive with the wonder and magic of a feminist awakening. One single mom becoming woke, struggling, and triumphing on her own outsider terms, We Were Witches is a new feminist classic, penned by one of the culture’s strongest authors at her most experimental and personal.

—Michelle Tea

Ask for We Were Witches wherever you buy books. Here are links to Bookshop.org and Amazon.

Blood-Red Bougainvillea – new Sunday essay in the Rumpus

I imagined my Gammie on the other end of the phone, her grey hair piled into a bun, a red silk scarf tied around it, her red-manicured nails clutching a Vodka tonic. Her skin was slightly darker than the rest of the women in our family, so she always joked about the milkman. “I can’t stand it,” she sighed now. “I’m the last Democrat in Orange County.”

I held the receiver away from my mouth so my Gammie wouldn’t hear the inhale and exhale of my cigarette.

“Darling,” she said. “You’re doing a marvelous job–as well as anyone could do–but children need fathers, don’t you agree?”

READ Blood-Red

The End of Eve

endofevecover

“The End of Eve had just about everything I ever want in a memoir: WTF plot events, almost-over-the-top characters that you never doubt are real, gorgeous and breathtaking moments of introspection, and wry humor.”

—Book Riot

 

“How Ariel puts human tenderness on the page is an act of poetry damn close to sublime.”

—Tom Spanbauer

“An experienced journalist and writer across genre, Gore’s prose is both eloquent and spare. Ultimately, The End of Eve is Gore’s story—an account of the imaginative strategies she employs to survive and create—in which she demonstrates how, much of the time, for her anyway, surviving and creating are one and the same.”

—Los Angeles Review of Books

 

You can buy all of Ariel Gore’s books from your local independent bookseller or from Powell’s.

Or listen to the audio version–read by the author.

 

The End of Eve wins New Mexico – Arizona Book Award

Ariel Gore’s darkly comic memoir, The End of Eve, just won a 2014 New Mexico – Arizona book award. You can get a signed copy right here. $16.95. FREE SHIPPING.

“It turns out that both life and art are balancing acts. In one as in the other, Gore seems to be saying that even as we acknowledge past traumas, we cannot let those wounds dictate our actions in the present. The End of Eve is a product of bravery, love, and hard-won wisdom. In sharing it, Ariel Gore invites her reader to bask in the light she has found.” —Los Angeles Review of Books